Bardella firing sets off media debate

The firing of Kurt Bardella has touched off a heated debate in Washington media circles about what reporters and press secretaries can honestly expect of each other, and whether people who spend their lives trying to unearth others’ secrets can reasonably expect to have any of their own.

Bardella was fired from his job as Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-Calif.) spokesman Tuesday after POLITICO reported that he had been sharing reporters’ e-mails with The New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich, who is writing a book on Washington’s political culture.

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POLITICO editor-in-chief John F. Harris made it clear from the beginning how he framed the ethics.

“The practice of sharing reporter e-mails with another journalist on a clandestine basis would be egregiously unprofessional under any circumstances,” he wrote in a letter to Issa’s office. “As the editor-in-chief of POLITICO, my concern is heightened by information suggesting that POLITICO journalists may have had their reporting compromised by this activity.”

“Although I would be the first to offer my condolences to any reporter whose e-mails or inquiries to a press officer had been blithely shared with another reporter, I wouldn’t spend more than five seconds on cheering him up,” Shafer wrote. “A certain variety of Washington reporter lives and dies by leaks from government officials, so I don’t see why a government official leaking to a reporter about a national security matter is kosher, but a government official leaking about what reporters are asking him about is ‘egregiously unprofessional.’”

Between these two poles, a debate played across the media and on Twitter between those who were shocked at Bardella’s behavior and those who saw it as business-as-usual in Washington’s backstabbing, gossip-obsessed political culture.

Bob Giles, curator at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, was among those who expressed surprise.

“I was a little stunned by it,” he said. “I think if a reporter communicates with somebody in Bardella’s position, he does so with the understanding that it’s a confidential communication. If I’m working on an exclusive story, and I go to Bardella to ask for information, I wouldn’t want my exclusive story to be spread around to reporters, even if it is someone working on a book. I think that’s a breach of an ethical understanding between a source and a reporter.”

Others agreed it was poor judgment on Bardella’s part.

“With apologies to Jim Croce, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t tug on Superman’s cape, and you certainly don’t violate a basic tenet of your occupation by sharing reporters’ thoughts one with the other,” wrote Richard Keil, a former White House correspondent for Bloomberg News who now works as a director at Purple Strategies, on POLITICO’s The Arena.

But Leibovich’s bosses at the Times were more in Shafer’s camp. Executive Editor Bill Keller took issue with Harris’s claim in his letter to Issa that “our reporting is proprietary, and our stories are competitive.”

“What Bardella did was hardly honorable, but I don’t think I’d claim that an e-mail to a government official was ‘proprietary’,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I’m not a lawyer, but I suspect that if Bardella had worked for the executive branch rather than Congress, his incoming e-mails would be all readily obtainable by FOIA. It is, as Jask said, another reason to think twice about what you put in your e-mail.”